


Fourteen Minutes

by LivaWilborg



Category: Assassin's Creed, Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Assassin's Creed III, Charles Lee's death, Connor needing answers, Gen, Haytham being Haytham, Modern AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-01
Updated: 2017-01-01
Packaged: 2018-09-13 23:14:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9146314
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LivaWilborg/pseuds/LivaWilborg
Summary: Now, watch closely, dear reader: for my first *amazing* trick in 2017, I'm going to SAVE HAYTHAM'S LIFE!! =DModern AU-version of the fight between Haytham and Connor at the end of AC3, and the aftermath and consequence of the mercy given. ...Whose mercy, though?





	

Retracting the blade from the flesh. The blood was hot on his hand, seeped into his sleeve, the knees of his pants.

_I should have killed you years ago._

The eyes closed. Hands relaxed. Kenway looked more peaceful in the light of the lonely streetlamp, with the blood blossoming darkly under him, than Connor had ever seen him.

The Assassin’s breath was still heaving painfully in his battered body. Those hands had been locked around his throat… Hands…

He froze, about to haul himself to his feet despite the pain – he had to flee the scene before the cops, or worse, Abstergo, got here. They would be here shortly, the explosion would have seen to that.

Hands!

His brain finally realised what he’d seen and he tore Kenway’s sleeve up with numb fingers.

A hidden blade. Old. Obviously well used and cared for. The trigger-mechanism hidden under the Templar ring on his finger.

He made the call before he even realised the phone was out of his pocket. Gave the address as near as he could tell, a description of the injury – stab victim, liver pierced, bleeding out, unconscious. He hung up and spent the next minutes fighting to stop the blood that still trickled from the wound in ever weakening sloshes, while one hand worked to unfasten the all too familiar buckles on the hidden blade.

Sirens approached.

He had just slipped into the shadows on the factory roof when the ambulance arrived. Police wasn’t far behind. He couldn’t stay.

He slipped into the darkness, but kept looking over his shoulder.

 

o-0-o

-Six weeks later-

 

Fourteen minutes…

Fourteen. Minutes.

Somehow, the words were constantly in his mind, lurking there, just a whispered undercurrent. He’d been dead for fourteen minutes. And then the medics had pulled him back from the nameless darkness. And suddenly fourteen minutes of his life were, technically, not of his _life_.

It really shouldn’t be that difficult to grasp. The body was just a machine; it had lost power, it had been brought back online.  That was the end of it. Or it should be. But as though that wasn’t difficult enough to grasp, the boy who was behind it…

Why?

Was it mercy? He’d listened to the recording of the call to the emergency services so many times he knew every inflection, every piece of background noise, every breath; as he’d listened intensely for some sort of explanation. The boy had gone out of his way to mend what he’d broken …only seconds after he’d broken it, in fact.

It didn’t make sense.

He felt as though life and everything he believed in held him at gunpoint and forced him to question, re-evaluate, reconsider. The core personality, the knowledge, the experience, told him to simply take what he was given and laugh it off. To see it as a weakness in his opponent. To continue the work and not look back. Because the work _was_ important. The cause _was_ honourable. He _did_ believe he was doing what was best. For everyone.

Why, though?

 _Why_ had he done it?

They didn’t owe each other anything. There was no contract of familiarity, of happy past experiences shared. They were, in everything but genetics, perfect strangers who’d learned to dislike each other intensely through their opposing beliefs, choices and actions.

His hand tightened on the steering wheel and he sighed, annoyed …no, angry, with himself, without knowing exactly why.

Fourteen damned minutes.

The GPS told him to take the next exit. The dead, tinny voice felt like a personal insult and he angrily turned the radio on and let the dreary pop, or house, or whatever the hell soulless music was called these days, be the brunt of the anger while the miles vanished under the wheels and the sun sank below the horizon.

There was no solution. No conclusion.

Not on his own.

So this was his only gambit. A horrendously unprotected cell phone, registered with a mundane phone company in his own name, which would happily broadcast his remote and isolated position to anyone with just a smidgen of interest in the comings and goings of Haytham Kenway.

This strategy was basically tantamount to suicide by white hoodie. He’d asked himself if he cared, and his answer, here, post mortem, was always no.

What could a dead man have to fear, anyway…

 

o-0-o

-Three days later-

 _It’s a trap_ , he’d been told. _Don’t go_. But he was here, and though his reason told him this could easily be his last day on earth, his heart reminded him how desperate this action was on Kenway’s part. Raw. Powerless, in a way.

If the man was going to get even, he would never choose this method; Connor knew it instinctively. An invitation like this, leaving himself open, weak; it was humiliating to a man like him.

He’d still approached the coordinates with extreme caution.

He’d found a car – expensive model, elegant but not showy – parked about a mile from the cabin. The trail that led through the dense forest to the cabin was too narrow for the vehicle. Kenway must have walked from there, carrying whatever equipment he had brought.

There was nothing primitive about the cabin, despite it being completely isolated in the forest. All the modern amenities were there. Electricity, water heater, TV-satellite dish. Of course. He couldn’t imagine Kenway would live without it if he had a choice.

He had spent hours observing the place through binoculars and thermal-imaging equipment for traps, cameras, weapons, explosives, even backup troops.

There was nothing.

Just Kenway making a sandwich; reading a book. Later he went out to check the generator at the back of the house. Then he set to chopping firewood, although he paused frequently and pressed a hand to his side, clearly pained; a little greyer and older somehow, than he had seemed before the fight. He was dressed in dark jeans and a shirt, unbuttoned at the neck, which just added to the out-of-place impression; there’d always been immaculate creases to his pants, always shirt, vest, tie, suit jacket, whenever they’d been unfortunate enough to run into each other.

It was always shirt and tie, even under a ballistics vest. He still remembered the absurdity of it from the brief time they had joined forces. ‘Casual’ and his biological father just didn’t live on the same planet. Or so he’d thought.

Connor watched him leaving the axe in the shed, building a fire in the wood burning stove in the living room, settling down at a desk with a laptop. After about an hour, the laptop was pushed aside, and he busied himself with a tablet instead.

The November sunset chilled the world and as darkness came creeping, he saw Kenway get up and stretch, walk around the living room a bit, rubbing his side where the hidden blade had bitten him. He walked to the front doors – glass in a wooden frame; pitiful from a security standpoint – worked with something on the counter, which Connor couldn’t see from this angle. Then he walked outside with a lantern; a lit candle flickering gently in the gathering twilight gloom. He put it down by the door and walked back inside. He didn’t bother locking the door.

Connor shook his head. The invitation couldn’t be more obvious, unless the man had come out of his near-death experience with a suicidal need to go back to join his ancestors.

He wasn’t certain what it meant. He wasn’t certain exactly what the invitation was for, what Kenway got out of it. But he needed an answer and the weapon he had kept with him since that night felt like a dark stain in his consciousness.

Quietly he climbed down from his vantage point and approached the cabin.

 

o-0-o

 

Haytham saw the movement behind him in the black mirror of the laptop screen pointed towards the glass doors. A greyish, undefined silhouette in the dark glare, standing still in the doorway like a vengeful ghost.

He sighed with relief. _Finally!_ A conclusion was at hand, whether by bullet, blade or words; the method wasn’t important.

“…I was considering having a cup of tea.” he said, before getting up and turning to look the visitor over. Connor’s eyes narrowed in the flickering light from the stove. There was a long knife strapped to his thigh below the tightfitting, light-grey jacket, a blade in his sleeve, a leather backpack hung from one shoulder, no firearm in immediate sight. “Do you want a cup, or is it a one-stab visit?”

“I don’t take candy from Templars. Or tea.” Connor said coldly, shrugging the bag off his shoulder and setting it on the polished stone kitchen counter, keeping his hand resting on the leather.

Haytham switched the light on in the kitchen. “You honestly think I’d be poisoning your tea, despite having met you in honest combat?” he asked over his shoulder as he poured water in the kettle. ”You think that’s a weapon I’d employ?” he demanded sharply as he faced the boy across the counter.

“I don’t think you’d hesitate to do anything if it served your purpose. I think you’d just call it a tool to be used and wash your hands of any moral issues.” Connor replied coldly.

Haytham’s hand tightened on the mug he had taken from the shelf and he had to force himself to put it gently down so it wouldn’t just shatter on the counter. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Alright, fine…” he finally said. “You can’t know any better …I suppose.” He put the fragrant leaves in the tea-strainer. “But if your opinion of me is really so low, why did you come here?”

With angry, sharp movements, Connor opened the bag and pulled Haytham’s hidden blade-gauntlet out. He put it down on the counter-top that stood as a protective barrier between them and let go of the weapon as if it made his skin crawl. “You will give me an explanation. You owe me that. And then I’ll leave and we can be rid of each other.”

“Wha…” Haytham stared at the familiar weapon. “What _exactly_ is it you believe I owe you?” He looked up to meet the boy’s cold stare, quietly surprised at how much anger radiated from him, though he obviously controlled the emotion as carefully as he was able. “No–“ Haytham held up a hand to stop the angry reply before it came. “I’m…” He took a deep breath and let his shoulders drop on exhale. “I’m sorry. I don’t want this to be just another quarrelling-session. I need an answer from you, too, and I’ll give you what you need as well as I’m able.”

He met the boy’s cold, evaluating gaze.

“You spared me!” Connor said, voice tight. He stabbed a finger at the weapon between them. “How many years have you worn this? Are you going to tell me you forgot it? That it just malfunctioned when you had your hands around my throat? You spared me! Gave me time. Why!” he demanded.

Haytham lowered his eyes and stared at the weapon; put his hands flat on the table to steady himself. He had never thought of this from the boy’s perspective. In the last month and a half, since he woke up in the hospital, he hadn’t seen his _own_ actions as something that demanded explanation.

“I… You forced my hand. Didn’t you…” he finally managed, unsure where the words came from. “You put me in a situation, where I could let my past die, or my future die. And, oddly, it wasn’t even a choice. I didn’t _spare_ you. There was just no other option available.” He looked up, expecting more anger; accusation born of wounded, childish pride. Instead, he saw simply a distrustful frown. “Don’t worry.” he added tiredly. “It’s not love or any kind of soggy, pseudo-parental sentimentality. I was simply protecting my legacy, for want of a better term.”

“You had won. You gave me mercy; it’s hard to see it any other way.”

“No!” Haytham stated with finality. “As Davenport taught me, extending mercy will always come back to haunt you. I’ve been murdering people since I was bloody ten years old, and feeling no worse for wear because of it. So though my action was selfish, and frankly stupid, it was all I could do. So live with it.” he spat, trying hard to put a lid on the helpless antagonism, which the obnoxious little muppet, with his massive delusions of entitlement, always managed to engender.

“Davenport.” Connor just said.

“Yes. How’s his knee, these days?” Haytham commented spitefully.

“He’s dead.”

The boy said it so tonelessly, his face suddenly completely devoid of anger, of anything. It was somehow too easy to mock the pain he was obviously masking and Haytham kept his acerbic comment under wraps, albeit with some difficulty.

“It was you? You crippled him?” Connor finally asked, some of the anger winding its way into his stance again.

“I should have killed him. I was persuaded to let him live. The kneecapping seemed a fair compromise... But here you are; haunting me.” he explained, finding much less caustic pleasure in it than he would have expected.

The electric kettle clicked off and he turned to pour his damned cup of tea. “I take it he’s not been keen on explaining to you, what actions of his earned him that bullet?”

“Who persuaded you?” the boy just demanded, dismissing Haytham’s comment.

“A friend. Someone I care about.”

“Friend?” the condescending disbelief was impossible to miss.

“Yes, goddammit, a friend, like actual human beings with thoughts and emotions have!” Haytham exploded. “And don’t act like your social life is a booming swarm of bosom companions.”

“Fine. I have my answer.” Connor slung the bag over his shoulder. “There’s nothi–“

“No! Don’t you dare, boy!” Haytham put the kettle on the counter with a loud clank. “You’re not moving from that spot until you explain to me exactly why _you_ did what you did. I’m facing my fifty-sixth birthday in a few weeks’ time because of your actions. It doesn’t make sense.”

“For someone who doesn’t want bickering, you’re not handling this very well, old man.” Conner snapped back.

“And for someone who already had an honest answer to his question, you’re not being half as fair as your self-righteous posturing wants me to believe you are.”

“Did you just call me self-righteous? You, a man who used me to kill himself and now tries to make me feel fortunate for it? Special? Who mocks the man who raised me. You have no right. You were never there.”

“Ah!” Haytham clapped his hands together in mean-spirited victory. “Finally, you come out of the bushes. I think it’s time we had a talk. You’re what, twenty-five? I can assume you’ve discovered women?”

Connor gave no answer; just looked at him with a mix of disgust and disbelief.

“I’ll take your silence as a yes. And these women who have crossed your path, do you know where they are, by any chance? Stalking them? Keeping tabs on them on facebook?”

“Have you lost your mind, old man!” Connor snapped impatiently.

“That outburst, I’ll interpret as a ‘no, I’m not stalking my former lovers’. So you don’t know what’s happened to every woman you’ve been friendly with?” he met Connor’s cold stare, and couldn’t keep a smile off his face. “Well, in that case: congratulations, you might be a father.”

He watched as the boy opened his mouth to give a pre-defined, caustic reply, but then thought better of it.

“In about twelve, maybe fifteen years,” Haytham continued, “with a few absurd twists of fate, perhaps your child will have teamed up with Charles’ twins to hunt you down for something you likely had nothing to do with.”

“Had nothing to do with…” Connor said tonelessly.

“Yes, well… ” Haytham felt his shoulders slump and his gaze fell on the stupid tea mug so he wouldn’t have to face the boy. “You did have everything to do with _that_ , didn’t you.”

“Yes.” Connor just confirmed. “He died with courage.”

Haytham looked up. There wasn’t pride or posturing in the boy. Just quiet self-confidence. He shook his head, searching for some way to navigate the minefield of his own emotions. He’d been in the hospital, barely conscious. He hadn’t heard of Charles’ death until almost a week after the funeral. “Perhaps…” he began, “Perhaps Davenport didn’t think it worth mentioning, but do you know why Charles was there, that day, all those years ago?”

“I’m sure you will give me an explanation I didn’t ask for, which will make no difference in the end.”

“Correct. I will. He was there to stop the Assassins who were going to blow up the precursor site your home sat on. We’d been negotiating for excavation-rights. The Assassins had done the same. We were winning. They wouldn’t let it ‘fall into the wrong hands’. Charles was there that day to stop them. …If I had known that Ziio–“

“Don’t. Speak. Her name!” Connor leaned across the counter. “She chose not to have you. You have no right to dirty her memory, or use her name in the hope it will make your lies more believable.”

Haytham sighed. Took a sip of his tea. “I have every right to speak of Ziio.” he said evenly, and switched to the Kanien’kéha language. “To speak of Kaniehtí:io. I even have a right to speak of Ratonhnhaké:ton. …Why would she give you such a name? Like she wanted you to start a fight with everything. Your life really is scratched.”  He calmly regarded the boy whose control of his fury was close to chipping. Perhaps he should feel smug about it, but it somehow didn’t come naturally right now.

“Is that supposed to impress me? That you know my language? Is that supposed to make you more believable?” Connor finally managed through clenched teeth.

“Ziio taught me my first words in her language. She was always so calm. For good reasons, I don’t know what sort of mother she was. But… I wonder, did you ever see her laugh?” he asked, switching back to English, and feeling a tiny smile tug at the corner of his mouth at a memory.

The only response was a furious, icy stare, so Haytham shrugged and continued: “She did her best, putting up a patient shield when she taught me, but on occasion, I’d say something so horrendously wrong, she would crumble _utterly_ and almost scream with laughter. Frankly, it was more than a little off-putting, but we usually ended up in bed after that. …So for all I know, you’re the direct result of my poor grasp on grammar.”

The boy just kept staring at him, obviously stuck in stoically controlled fury-mode. Haytham sighed. Apparently, a further explanation was called for. “When you blame me, you keep forgetting the tiny detail that I knew her well enough for you to see the light of day. Obviously, her dying has robbed her of any responsibility in your mind. You hate me for not having been there but, for all Ziio’s virtues, it was her extremely poor choice that made it so.”

“And can you think of any reason she would not want _you_ near her son?” Connor asked in a quiet voice, brimming with threat, which would – before his brush with death – have made Haytham go through a checklist of available weapons nearby. Bizarrely, he wasn’t even certain he’d defend himself if the boy chose to attack. Perhaps on instinct, he would? But it seemed pointless in light of everything that had happened.

He sighed. “I’ve often asked myself why she would make that choice. She obviously considered me good enough when we were together.” He shook his head. “She saw me kill. …She was capable in a fight herself, mind you. But she knew of my loyalties. Perhaps that was why.” He shrugged, mostly to try to throw the helplessness and old sense of betrayal off. “Perhaps she simply thought I’d throw a million lawyers at her and steal you away. I don’t know. But I know you can’t both blame me and consider her a saint. Not with any fairness.”

Connor retreated a bit and some of the aggression left. “Does it matter?” he finally asked. “Even if I accept that, there’s no room for you in my life. There is nothing between us.”

“Oh, such a pity. I was hoping we could bicker and stab our way through Christmas.”

“I don’t celebrate.”

“Of course you don’t. Because I _do_. You know, I periodically draw breath. Perhaps you should obstinately give up on that. Terrible white man’s habit.”

Haytham looked at his son and saw his own exhausted resentment mirrored in his face. It was probably a lost cause. The boy was right. There was nothing between them.

“I called the ambulance that night. I saved your life. I did it so I could stand here and listen to your never-ending sarcasm.” Connor said. “There, you have your answer. I’m leaving.” He turned towards the door.

“Not the full answer.” Haytham said quietly and put his hand on the weapon-gauntlet on the counter. “You took this. Why?”

“You didn’t deserve it. You haven’t earned it.” He turned to look at the weapon before meeting Haytham’s gaze.

“But you returned it. Do you know who it belonged to? Is that why you’re giving it back?”

“No. Who did you kill? Spew your joke and be done with it.” he snapped.

“Nobody.” Haytham said quietly. “Not for this. It was your grandfather’s.”

“You are lying.” Connor said, but it seemed a response on autopilot, rather than something he necessarily believed.

“I didn’t earn it. That’s true. Not by Assassin standards.” He studied the boy through narrowed eyes. “You didn’t know, did you? That I was born to be as you are.” He couldn’t keep a small laugh back. “…There’s a certain unlikely irony to it, isn’t there.”

“Who was he?” Connor asked, obviously still not convinced.

“Edward Kenway. Bit of a… drifter; a proto-hippie, I think, before he joined the Brotherhood. He held a small Caribbean island hostage and attempted to create a new nation with some equally drunk friends, back at the end of the fifties. Near as I can tell, that’s where he got his hands on an artefact and made contact with your kind. Then he used the press-attention, which his idiocy brought about, as a smokescreen.” Haytham shook his head; it seemed even more unbelievable telling the story aloud. “He mended his ways. He became a Master of your kind, in the British Brotherhood. Ended up leading them.”

Connor looked at him; a lot of the tense anger seemed to have taken a break. “Dead, I suppose.” he just commented.

“Killed, when I was ten.”

“By Templars.” Connor said. It wasn’t a question.

Haytham nodded, patiently waiting for the moral outburst concerning his choices.

The boy – man – just looked at him for a long time, unflinching, unreadable. Then he reached out for the mug on the counter, took a drink of tea, put the mug down next to the blade-gauntlet.

“You should retire.” Connor said and then he turned and left the cabin, not bothering to close the door behind him.

“Don’t get your hopes up…” Haytham muttered under his breath. He kept standing there for a long while, before he finally closed the door and finished his tea.

 

 

 


End file.
